I publish books and deliver them as conventional offset printed products. I would like to convert my books to e-books which my customers can download and print @ their desktop in limited quantities, with printing permission limited by either cumulative quantity or a sunset date. How can I do this?
Printing permission, with limits
2008-12-17 11:52:40
My Product Information:
Acrobat Pro 9.0, Macintosh
Acrobat Pro 9.0, Macintosh
2008-12-18 01:07:12
#1
A PDF is either printable or not, but you can't control quantity. Even if you applied a DRM-based solution to the PDF, all they'd have to do is change the "copies" field in their print driver window, and there's no (legal) way you can take control of their hardware drivers.
2008-12-18 08:52:22
#2
What about limiting Print by date? Then I could license unlimited printing for 30 days, a year, etc.
2008-12-18 09:41:46
#3
The problem is that your PDF (and the Acrobat/Reader UI as a whole) doesn't get to limit [i]how[/i] the document is printed, so if you encoded a DRM-style solution to allow printing only till Dec 25th, then all they'd have to do is print your PDF to another PDF and they'd get a copy with no restrictions, and you'd have no way of even knowing they'd done it. They'd lose nonprintable functionality (3D, video, whatever) but you're talking about somehow stopping a user from being able to make paper spew from their printer, which is only possible if you drive over, break in and stand next to them with a hammer.
It's a bit like the questions we're regularly asked over stopping people from saving a copy of a PDF - Acrobat and Reader, either with plugins or without, can control what happens to a PDF [u]only[/u] in the context of what happens "inside" the application - when it's being treated as just a file on a disk or a Postscript stream in a printer driver, it's the operating system that controls things. Nothing inside your PDF can ever change that, so if the user has the option to print, they can print any which way they want, just as if they have a copy on disk they can make as many copies on as many CDs as they want. When people try to impose DRM at a driver or OS level they usually end up in court, as a group of well-known chaps from Sony will testify (and indeed had to).
It's a bit like the questions we're regularly asked over stopping people from saving a copy of a PDF - Acrobat and Reader, either with plugins or without, can control what happens to a PDF [u]only[/u] in the context of what happens "inside" the application - when it's being treated as just a file on a disk or a Postscript stream in a printer driver, it's the operating system that controls things. Nothing inside your PDF can ever change that, so if the user has the option to print, they can print any which way they want, just as if they have a copy on disk they can make as many copies on as many CDs as they want. When people try to impose DRM at a driver or OS level they usually end up in court, as a group of well-known chaps from Sony will testify (and indeed had to).